Voice announce calls on iPhone with… GarageBand?
This has to go in the “why didn’t I think of that?” category which I don’t think we have. It’s a slick and simple hack to get an iPhone to voice announce your callers by name and the concept can be used for practically any phone that supports custom ring tones.Here’s the trick from Mac OSX Hints: just use GarageBand 4 to record a contact name in your own voice. NOTE: Feel free to ask a friend to record the name for you if they have that sexy, breathy voice that’s pleasing to the ears. Save the recorded name and use it as a custom ringtone for that particular contact and you’re good to go! It’s a bit of work to do the voice-overs for all of your contacts, but you can do as many or as few as you need in a relatively short time.(via Steve Rubel)
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Or, just buy a Windows Mobile phone and MS Voice Command. You’ll spend the same amount of money and you don’t have to waste time recording names for all those contacts. 504 contacts for me is a lot of recording to do.
Voice Command can be set to read out who’s calling when they do call.
Voice command sounds a bit too robotic for me. It’s especially good at butchering last names. On-screen caller id or address book lookup is good enough for me.
I used the AT&T Natural text to speech demo at http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php
Many voices and it’s free!!!
Or just use Grand Central, which voice announces all calls (either in the caller’s own voice or in a computer generated female voice.) Incoming calls free.
Yeah, I also saw the AT&T trick here.
http://www.iphoneskinning.com/2007/12/really-custom-ringtones-for-iphone.html